Intercultural Antipsychiatry

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of intercultural anti-psychiatry based on the analysis of a community care practice in which Mauritanian Peul exiles, living in an «irregular administrative» situation in Brussels, provide accommodation and support to Belgian people with mental/relational illness, within the framework of an anti-psychiatric activist association, while being advised on their request for asylum. In the light of this case study, we discuss David Cooper's proposal regarding the creation of care communities. In these communities, the division between expert and profane knowledge is abolished, and the link between harmful social relations and the genesis of suffering is made evident, politicizing what psychotechnologies call madness. This approach is based on the questioning of the concept of normality, raised by Cooper, decentering his locus of cultural enunciation, as well as the ethnocentric axis of his antipsychiatric proposal, from the co-production of intercultural narratives and practices regarding health and disease. Some contributions are made to the proposal of antipsychiatry based on the concepts of self-care and therapeutic nomadism. We conclude with some provisional suggestions for a possible identification and/or social co-production of other intercultural antipsychiatric practices.